Airports and politics

Thank goodness I'm not trying to fly today.

Instead I'm at home listening to the 20-year-old deejay on WTUL play protest songs about Guantanamo and American foreign policy.

Of course there are liberals who have a deep and nuanced understanding of the situation in the Middle East. Thomas Friedman comes to mind. But for every dittohead and Coulter acolyte on the right, there's someone on the left like my former coworker who in the summer of 2001 was circulating a petition protesting the Taliban's destruction of Buddhist statutes, but after 9/11 was appalled that we went to war in Afganistan.

Why is it so hard for people to tolerate even the tiniest bit of complexity or ambiguity? They've got to have white hats and black hats. And to my co-worker, America's black hat was apparently bigger and blacker than the Taliban's.

Yes, Bush is a disaster. We probably shouldn't have gone to war in Iraq, we definitely had the wrong motives and we definitely made a mess of it. Yes, there's a lot of our foreign policy to be ashamed of that hasn't exactly helped us win the goodwill of the rest of the world.

But the Islamic fundamentalist world has declared war on us. We're not innocent, but we're not the villian, either. This has more to do with their pathologies than ours. They won't go away if we ignore them and leave them alone, as much as I might prefer that option.

There was an article in Salon.com recently in which the author expessed the opinion that Lebanon was the best hope for a viable democracy in the Middle East. And I wondered since when was Israel not a democracy? Again, I'm not a big Zionist. Israel has been a bully and has blood on its hands. It's not really a good thing to tell innocent Lebanese civilians to evacuate, then target missiles at the highway they're trying to evacuate on. Nevertheless, you have to consider that Israel is surrounded by people who are committed to wiping it the face of the map. It's no surprise it's a little trigger happy. It's complicated, see? The world is like that, my little college radio pontificators.

Oh my, maybe I've become a centrist. A moderate. How boring.

Or maybe it's just that the leftist party line has gone really, really wrong on a couple of issues, and this is one of them.